Seeing Hope in Destruction

I am deeply passionate about the climate crisis and our connection with the world. That passion was fueled by the knowledge I gained during the semester I spent on my Farm to Table Concentration in college. My primary professor for that semester assigned us many exceptional reads that served to heighten my awareness about the world around me and the role that we all play in altering it. Although assigned by this professor as reading for my final semester in college, not my Concentration semester, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince had, perhaps, the most profound impact on me.

This work is presented in chapters that follow along with the author’s travels. She recounts stories of climate change in all corners of the world. With each leg of the journey, she delves into different aspects of climate change - from root causes of this crisis to direct effects of a warming climate to the innovative ways in which people are trying to cope with their rapidly changing environment. Before I began reading this book, I had a solid understanding of The Situation - how we got here and why we continue to seemingly fight for a collapse. However, if I’m being completely honest I had not previously spent a tremendous amount of time finding out where exactly here is and contemplating what exactly might be to come. As I worked my way through this book, I found myself preoccupied by exactly those things. While yes, this was assigned reading over the course of several weeks and it was expected that I spend a good deal of time mulling it over, I want to make it clear that I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it (even the painful parts, as they felt necessary for me to absorb) and I spent FAR more than the expected amount of time thinking about it. I feel the need to point out here that I read the vast majority of this while pacing around my yard, surrounded by greenery and open air. To me, this book wasn’t just something to read; it was a full force immersion. In a way, I came out of it reborn.

I FELT so much in the duration of this book. I was brought to tears more than once. Do you ever read something and just feel so passionately about it that your eyes start to water and you feel it in your soul? Since I read this work, that happens to me with pretty much anything with a twinge of hope that relates to the climate crisis. There are countless depressing facts and statistics, of course, that make up the bulk of the conversation on human-caused climate warming, and, honestly, reading them and letting them really sink in is a necessary, albeit emotional, part of the journey to understanding our mission as stewards of this Earth. Vince does a wonderful job of presenting these dismal realities with the meaningful, pitiful, and/or incredible efforts of people to counteract the harm we have already done/continue to inflict on our home and each other. While I would love to give specific examples here, I will refrain from doing so in an effort to encourage more of you to go and read this work yourselves.

* Prepare yourself for a spoiler to the final chapter or stop reading here. *

Perhaps the most touching part for me was the final chapter in which Vince beautifully depicts a possible future scenario in a world her son (a baby at the time she wrote it) might live in as an adult if people make a drastic turn toward greener living and embrace the harmony that we can have with the rest of nature, while maintaining technological advances. This book helped me understand that there can be hope found despite all the destruction we cause. There can be beauty in the chaos. While there is no denying the irreversible damage we have already done, we can still create a beautiful future if we actually try and act fast - together.